Papa

Adios Hemingway, Leonardo Padura Fuentes (a novel)

Ernest Hemingway, Mary V. Dearborn

He was a man's man.

The kind of man about whom Richard Slotkin wrote in Regeneration Through Violence; the man who "won the West;" the man with a house full of animal heads, a case full of guns, a rotting liver and a gigantic libido.

A dinosaur.  Like God, our culture--dishonest, feckless, preening, consumerist, shallow--has killed off men like Hemingway. Outside of the military, the version of masculinity Hemingway represented has passed into oblivion.  He was a bully and a drunk and an artist. He did not suffer fools; he didn't bow down to the gods of money and power. He was, like him or not, his own man.
 

In his various biographical guises, Hemingway comes off as brutal and bloodthirsty, buffoonish, drunken, insecure, and, near the end of his life, paranoid.  After reading Mary Dearborn's  biography it is difficult to disagree with this evaluation But he was also courageous, generous, loyal, and committed to his art.

I am rereading a handful of the novels and trying to recapture some of the excitement they engendered in me when I was a young man. To be honest, I'm ambivalent about all of them except for The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and The Sea. The simple cadences of his style--a style learned during Hemingway's brief stint at the Kansas City Star--feels more like reportage than literature. In the opening of To Have and Have Not, for instance, I can't make out the look of the bar (it's the Floridita in Havana) or the disposition of the characters during the gunfight that initiates the story.  The scene is flattened, more like a series of still photos than a narrative describing propulsive action. I understand what Hemingway was aiming for, a laconic detachment implying an unwillingness to judge events, but I can no longer live comfortably without judgments, without a sense of the weightiness of things.This feeling is unshakable during even the best sections of The Sun Also Rises, a book that might have been written by Camus or Gide or Beckett. 

In this post I want to approach Hemingway in terms of a philosophical problem rather than from the point of view of literary merit. The wonderful Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuenctes invites us, in his tiny gem of a novel Adios Hemingway, to rethink Hemingway's life and art, and I have tried to do so.

Please bear with this brief sidebar:

David Hume argued that there can be no such thing as a "self." In our internal life we note a riot of impressions, ideas, memories, sensations, fears, desires, opinions, and so forth. We flit from one thing to another. While we are performing even the most intimate and intensive actions--making love or writing poems--our minds still move to other things: the cool feeling of the air moving through the window, the dog that never ceases barking, the slight pain our knee, the bottle of wine that we will enjoy with dinner.  Everyone before Hume simply assumed that the mind was a theater and that the panoply of acts that crossed the stage was objectively observed by the Soul, made note of and rounded up in some fashion in order to create the Self.  Kant took Hume's point and ran with it--in the first critique he developed the notion of Transcendental Idealism, of an objective, self-observant critical consciousness.

Kant's understanding of how the mind imposes order on the outside world--in part through the categories of space, time, and causality--was unsatisfactory on a number of levels, and generations of critics wrestled with the fundamental problem that Hume articulated and that Kant believed he had settled.  Namely, how does the mind order the world in such a way that it appears to possess continuity and coherence? And what is this self or mind apart from the impressions it receives? The absurdity of Locke's idea of the "blank slate" made Kant's reconstruction of the inner life all the more important. 

To get some idea of what Kant was worried about, imagine that you were to forget the past, to sustain a brain injury that eradicated your memory and therefore your personality. Would you still be the person you had been?  What is this Self in which we place so much faith, that we give our name, that we trust to be there when we need it? ("Just be yourself" we say, and. "Be true to yourself"). This sounds like an argument you might have had in a college dorm room--it probably was--but even this crude formulation of the problem suggests something of the difficulty we face when thinking about our inner life and how it is connected to our sense of self.

 
What does any of this have to do with Hemingway?

No writer I can think of so carefully (or carelessly) blended his writing and his life; or, to put it another way, I can think of no other writer whose literary achievements are as inextricably bound to a particular way of life, a way of life that, as Mary Dearborn makes plain, Hemingway deliberately cultivated and consciously pursed.  He lived his books as few writers have lived theirs, and when he could no longer live a life centered on hunting, fishing, drinking, and pursuing women not only did he cease writing, he ceased living.  Beginning in 1958, Hemingway slipped into paranoia, ill-health, and senility; he no longer was the man he had been, and therefore the writer he had been.

It is the story of the slipping out of a life that Leonardo Padura Fuentes tells in Adios Hemingway. Mario Conde, the hero of Fuentes's wonderful Havana mysteries (try Havana Blue), has retired from police work to become a writer. His former partner and now chief of the Havana police asks Conde to investigate the identity of a body that has been unearthed on Heminway's former Finca, now a museum, or mausoleum, dedicated to the writer's years in Cuba.  Conde, who once revered Hemingway and took the novelist as his role model, has come to despise "Papa," to see the American ex-pat as  loutish and cruel, a man who was, in fact, capable of murder.  Conde takes on the job of identifying the corpse and finding the killer, and in doing so he unearths not just the body of an FBI agent and the killer, but also the central mysteries of Hemingway's life. 

While Conde sets out to solve a murder, the reader is led back in time to Hemingway's final days in Cuba. I loved these sections for their rich evocation of the writer's life, and for their intelligent exploration of the connection between the self and the artist. In Heminway's case, this connection was absolute and therefore is a provocation to think about the meaning of literary art.

Fuentes's explores with great economy and delicacy the connection between the self-identity of Hemingway and his sense of himself as an artist.  Once he can no longer live as he has lived, once he must renounce the outward roles he has played--as a hunter, a drinker, a lover--his inner world shrivels to nothing. He can't finish Death in the Afternoon because he can no longer evoke the drama of a bullfight. And, lacking the ability to write, why go on living?

That so slender and so unpretentious a novel would lead me to reread Hemingway, to search out a new biography, to write for days in my notebook about the relationship(s) between the writer's life and the writer's perception of his inner self, all of this speaks volumes about Fuentes's art.  I have just ordered Fuentes's big novel about Trotsky, The Man Who Loved Dogs and am looking forward to writing about it in a future episode of Talented Reader.   What is summer for but the discovery of exciting new books and writers? 

Have a cigar. 

George Ovitt (6/19/2018)

A Confederation of Souls

Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi

 

I'm nothing.     

I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.

But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Windows of my room,
The room of one of the millions nobody knows
(And if they knew me, what would they know?)

               Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)

The médecins-philosophes were a revolutionary group of French physician-philosophers who, throughout the latter half of the 18^th century, sought to combine the best medical practices of the day with the prevailing philosophical thinking. Among their most well-known notions was that of the confederation of souls, the theory that every human being is comprised, not of a single discrete soul, but of numerous souls, all of which are governed by a single ruling ego.   

Pereira Declares is a brilliant short novel set in Portugal, in Lisbon in the summer of 1938, near the start of the grim, fascist regime of António Salazar, the story of a lonely, overweight journalist and widower named Dr. Pereira who is content just to keep his head down by writing a culture page for a small, conservative newspaper called Lisboa, translating an occasional short story from the French, and spending his afternoons eating and drinking at his favorite café. Never interested politics, he doesn’t want to cause trouble, he doesn’t want to make waves.

One day, while in conversation at his favorite cafe, his friend, Dr. Cardoso, introduces him to the work, the thinking, of the médecins-philosophes, explaining to him in summary that “…within us we each have numerous souls…a confederation which agrees to put itself under the government of one ruling ego… It may be,” continues Dr. Cardoso, “that after slowly nibbling away in you some ruling ego is gaining the chieftainship of your confederation of souls, Dr. Pereira, and there’s nothing you can do about it except perhaps give it a helping hand whenever you get the chance.” It is an idea that intrigues him, but to which he gives little attention until he makes the acquaintance of a young man named Monteiro Rossi, whom he decides to recruit for the newspaper in order to create an archive of “advance obituaries on the writers of our times.” It is an encounter that marks a tuning point in his otherwise safe and apathetic life, drawing him swiftly into the heart of the politically dangerous times. While initially resistant to the call of this new ruling ego within himself, insisting to Rossi, “I am neither one of you, nor one of them, I prefer to keep to myself,” he is finally forced to commit himself, to enter the world, to act at last in the name of a matters greater, more lasting than himself. 

 

Peter Adam Nash

Balkan Ghosts

Girl at War, Sara Nović (fiction)

The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder (not fiction)

Though we could not have known it at the time, the war and "ethnic cleansing"--that is, genocide--in Yugoslavia foreshadowed all that was to come following the breakup of the Soviet Union. The patched-together, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, polyglot Yugoslavia was itself the creature of another empire's implosion--the Austro-Hungarian, which was, in turn, the mid-nineteenth century remnant of the great Hapsburg Empire founded in 1279.  Large, ungainly conglomerations of people never endure; tribalism trumps cosmopolitanism; hopeful chatter about how people of different "races and religions" can "put away their differences" and "live together in peace" have proven time and again to be illusion.  The horror that erupted in the Balkans in 1991was mostly ignored in the West until the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

Timothy Snyder demonstrates with his usual clarity and enormous erudition--he reads not only the usual European languages but also Polish and Russian--that the Russia of Putin was founded, with sclerotic assistance from Boris Yeltin and the ever-naive West, as an embodiment of eternal principles, that is of idea related to the fascist's disbelief in historical change, in liberal progress, in the dialectic processes that underpin republicanism and democracy. Putin is of course the new Tsar, but, more than that, he embodies Ivan Ilyin's view that history isn't about people at all, rather it is about the recovery of Divine Will as personified by an absolute ruler--a fascist prince not unlike Mussolini, Hitler, or Putin himself.  A ruler who brooks no opposition, no compromise, no critics.

Ilyin, as Snyder shows, is the hero of the New Russia, the court philosopher and, though dead, its guiding light. Of course unquestioning obedience suits a kleptocracy perfectly, and those who worry that any democratic compromises will undercut their power are naturally drawn to the rabid thinkers like Ilyin who loathed any form of popular governance. *

Girl at War, Sara Nović's strong debut novel, answers, with great empathy, the question: "What happens to the victims of war?" We might read about unspeakable crimes--as with the Balkan war, massacres, mass graves, torture centers, rape--but don't have a clue as to how those who survive carry on with their lives. Nović's "girl," the resolute and courageous thirteen-year-old Ana Juric, watches Zagreb, her home, succumb to the Serbian Cetniks (or Chetniks), an ultra-rightest, Serbian nationalist group committed to the "ethnic cleansing" of what they considered "greater Serbia." Her own family falls victim to a Serbian militia, and she finds herself living, and fighting, with the Croatian resistance. A remarkable, yet credible set of circumstances sees Ana rescued from the fighting and sent to live in the United States with the family that has already adopted her younger sister.  

The central section of this triptych of a novel is set ten years after Ana's rescue and describes her difficulty--one can well imagine it--adjusting to a the normal life of an American college student.  We understand that overcoming memory is impossible, and that returning to Zagreb offers Ana the only hope she has of finding--what? People like to say "closure," but what does that mean? "Healing" isn't an option. I think of Ana's return to the scenes of the crimes committed against her and her family as a validation of her identify. She is no longer Croatian, nor is she American; rather she is one of the millions--a number that grows daily--of the victims of war, of forced migration and displacement, of ethnic and tribal hatreds that give the lie to the fantasy of globalism and cosmopolitanism.  

Girl at War powerfully evokes recent history in retelling Ana Juric's story, but the novel is important because its theme is universal. Victors have short memories; it is the victims who are obliged to keep the past alive for the rest of us. 
 

"Now I'm retired, but I'm still in a good mood to kill people," asserts Vojislav Carkic, an Orthodox priest who served with the Chetniks during the Yugoslav war.  God's work, in this priest's view, remains unfinished so long as there are non-Serbs--Muslims and Catholics--in God's Serbia.  This was what Ilyin had in mind back in the 1930's, a righteous Holy War of the Orthodox--Russians in Ilyin's case--a war to cleanse God's earth of sinners and unbelievers.  That war continues.

George Ovitt (June 3, 2018)

*I don't believe that quoting Ilyin makes Putin, or anyone else, a fascist just as, for example, quoting Heidegger doesn't make someone a Nazi. There are other grounds for thinking Putin's government is most akin to fascist governments of the past. Some of the arguments are to be found in Snyder, but others may be found in Masha Gesson's most recent book, The Future is History.

When You Come From Water

      “Atlas” by Terisa Siagatonu

      If you open up any atlas

      and take a look at a map of the world,

      almost every single one of them

      slices the Pacific Ocean in half.

      To the human eye,

      every map centers all the land masses on Earth

      creating the illusion

      that water can handle the butchering

      and be pushed to the edges

      of the world.

      As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body

      living today, beating the loudest heart,

      the reason why land has a pulse in the first place.

      The audacity one must have to create a visual so

     violent as to assume that no one comes

      from water so no one will care

      what you do with it

      and yet,

      people came from land,

      are still coming from land,

      and look what was done to them.

      When people ask me where I’m from,

      they don’t believe me when I say water.

      So instead, I tell them that home is a machete

      and that I belong to places

      that don’t belong to themselves anymore,

      broken and butchered places that have made me

      a hyphen of a woman:

      a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both

      colonizer and colonized,

      both blade and blood.

      California                          stolen.

      Samoa                                        sliced in half                                          stolen.

      California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful

      country on this planet.

      Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it’s no wonder

      people doubt its existence.

      California, a state of emergency away from having the drought

      rid it of all its water.

      Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery

      if the sea level doesn’t stop rising.

      When people ask me where I’m from,

      what they want is to hear me speak of land,

      what they want is to know where I go once I leave here,

      the privilege that comes with assuming that home

      is just a destination, and not the panic.

      Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to.

      What is it like? To know that home is something

      that’s waiting for you to return to it?

      What does it mean to belong to something that isn’t sinking?

      What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood?

      So many of us come from water

      but when you come from water

      no one believes you.

      Colonization keeps laughing.

      Global warming is grinning

      at all your grief.

      How you mourn the loss of a home

      that isn’t even gone yet.

      That no one believes you’re from.

      How everyone is beginning

      to hear more about your island

      but only in the context of

      vacations and honeymoons,

      football and military life,

      exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches

      but never asks about the rest of its body.

      The water.

      The islands breathing in it.

      The reason why they’re sinking.

      No one visualizes islands in the Pacific

      as actually being there.

      You explain and explain and clarify

      and correct their incorrect pronunciation

      and explain

      until they remember just how vast your ocean is,

      how microscopic your islands look in it,

      how easy it is to miss when looking

      on a map of the world.

      Excuses people make

      for why they didn’t see it

      before.

      Source: Poetry (April 2018)

Special thanks to my wife, Annie Nash, for bringing this poem, this remarkable poet, to my attention.

Peter Adam Nash

Coming of Age

Euphoria, by Lily King

Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle, by Lois W. Banner

 Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, argues that the world would be a better place if everyone followed the dictates of "reason"--defined, I suppose, as linear/empirical/analytical/Western thought. If, in PInker's view, everyone abandoned magical thinking, religion, superstition, and metaphysics the excesses of religious fundamentalism, irrationality, and cruelty would give way to material progress for all.  Pinker, high atop Harvard Hill, reminds us that science and technology, leavened by the arts and humanities, have led to progress ever since the Enlightenment. E.O. Wilson, also at Harvard, has made the same point in a number of books, and corporate types like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have found much to like in this rationalist view of progress. I remain unpersuaded. For one thing, "reason" is a form of problem solving; by itself, our rational (critical, analytical, scientific) mode of thinking has no material or moral content, as Kant famously understood. At best, "reason" functions as lines on a blank page, a rubric, an outline. Living a life, building a just society, includes not only analytical thinking but also willing, desiring, believing, and--let's face it--lots of luck. 

***

 It is impossible, post-Freud, not to see the "primitive" peoples of Samoa as occupying a landscape of desire and will, of cultural expressions innocent of the Puritanical and patriarchal denial of the (female) body.  No analytical reasoning was discovered by Mead and Benedict and Bateson and Boas in Samoa or the Amazon basin. The peoples of the Sepik River of New Guinea possess botanical knowledge one associates with hunter-gatherers, simple technologies (these are stone-age cultures), and an intimacy with nature that Rousseau would have admired. In her dual biography, Intertwined Lives, Lois Banner does an admirable job of sketching the sexual repressions of American society in the early twentieth century and the effects of these repressions on the two most famous women anthropologists of the twentieth century.  Havelock Ellis and other sexologists, bohemians, and free spirits defied the strictures on sexuality, but the psychic price paid by unmarried heterosexuals and all homosexuals (in the language of the age) was debilitating.  In Samoa, where, in the 1930's, Christian missionaries were just beginning to spread the gospel of celibacy, a woman or a man could find a culture where sexual taboos were mild, where women had a measure of control over their reproductive lives, and where--best of all--no one was watching.

***

Of the many discouraging words I hear from young people, the most discouraging have to do with something that those of us brought up in the positivist tradition refer to as "human nature." Thus one can select any assumptions about human beings and ascribe them to "human nature." As in, "people are greedy; it's just human nature," or "people are violent; it's human nature."  No amount of questioning can dislodge the conviction that all of us come hard-wired with precisely the set of innate characteristics that define twenty-first century American society--greed, materialism, indifference to other people, a fascination with violence (done to others), hedonism, and a vague understanding of   the goods that comes from science and technology.  I used to argue with people about "human nature," suggesting that even in purely Darwinian terms the "struggle for life" might as easily include altruism and self-sacrifice as greed and violence. But such arguments get nowhere. After all, the evidence appears overwhelming: nobody reports the countless daily acts of kindness and selflessness that make our families, communities, and our society workable. Those who are inclined to see the world as something other than a Hobbesian struggle are far less likely to boast about their beliefs. Ordinary men and decent women seldom go into public life, appear on television,  or find themselves in the limelight.  My students know of Gordon Gecko but have never heard of Dorothy Day.

***

I now respond to "everyone is greedy" with the simple admonition "read some anthropology."

***

Do you remember how moved you felt when you read Marjorie Shostak's Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung San Woman? The book was a revelation, and while I have only taken one anthropology course in my life, Shostak, who died too young, got me to read more books like hers, first-person accounts of people whose world-view is wholly different from my own.  

***

Rereading Ruth Benedict's Patters of Culture in the light of Lily King's extraordinary novel Euphoria, I am reminded again of the indelible fact that "human nature," like human culture, is as varied and rich as the heavenly constellations. I am fortunate enough to live in the same region as people for whom selflessness, community, collective identity, spirituality, and life mean more than greed, individualism, materialism, and death.  If there is a single culture that practices selflessness  and altruism than the "human nature" argument is fallacious.  Marshall Sahlins's view of hunter-gatherers as the "original affluent society" and Marjorie Shostak's work on the !Kung open the door to our understanding of how so-called "primitive" societies give the lie to the notion that the apogee of human existence is found in the industrial West and in Enlightenment reason.

***
Lily King has taken the rudiments of the story of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and  Reo Fortune in Samoa and turned it into a philosophical novel of the highest order.  Nellie, Fen, and Bankson bring to their field work among the Tam three entirely different views of the purposes of anthropology, and, by extension, three different views of life.  Nell is generous, open-minded, fearless, empathetic, warm, and humane. Fen is harsh and judgmental, engaged with other cultures to the extent that they allow him to ignore his own demons; he is married to Nell but treats her as if she were a foreign culture, someone whose habits of mind are unworthy of his attention.  The effect that Fen has on Nell is predictable: she feels as if she is alone, a stranger in a (very) strange land,  and while her isolation helps deepen her skills as a passive observer of other cultures, it diminishes her spirit.  Bankson, who narrates most of the novel, is diffident, uncertain of his skills as a scientist, but, like Nell, he possesses patience and compassion.  How ironic that in this novel it is the least "rational" among the scientists who understands most deeply what it means to live in a world defined by custom and not laws. Bankson's shy approach to his anthropological subjects takes him far more deeply into the world of the Tam than Fen's ultimately tragic attempt to become his subjects. Lily King subtly brings Nell and Bankson together; that they will come to love one another is foreordained, but what's really beautiful is how the study of the Tam and the cautious circling of this trio of anthropologists reflect each other.  Just as Nell and Bankson use their good hearts to uncover the mysteries of a stone-age culture, so too do they gradually begin to understand one another. Fen is the odd man out. He doesn't wish to study anything--he wants to dominate those around him, he wishes to exert his will over others, and in this he serves both as the perfect model of the Westerner among "savages" and the perfect foil to Nell and Bankson.  The old dichotomy between head and heart is played out in Euphoria with delicacy and brilliance.



***

The practice of field anthropology is an odd one. That a Westerner could "live among" people as foreign as the Tam (a fictional tribe, but there are plenty of real-life examples) and somehow come to "understand" them seems like folly. If the observation of a physical state changes that state and makes objectivity impossible, how much more so does the physical presence of a stranger among an isolated tribal group undo any possibility of understanding?  And, worse, as Euphoria makes plain, how much damage do well-meaning scientists do when they intrude upon the intimate lives of strangers?  Euphoria does many things well--it's a love story, an adventure novel, a philosophical investigation--but above all it is a book that raises fundamental questions about the pretensions of Western reason and science.  Our brash conviction that we can understand, and by understanding control, the world feel especially hollow when that understanding and control is directed at a group of people who might prefer to be left in peace.  The notion of "picking a tribe" and, uninvited, going to live among them, studying them as one might study an exotic species of bird, feels at times more like imperialism than science.

 

George Ovitt (16 May 2018)